Mariette Monpierre grew up in Paris not knowing her father. When she was an adult she went to her native country, Guadeloupe, to try to find him. “I really yearned to see his eyes, feel his touch, be hugged by him,” Monpierre said.
Her trip was not a happy one. “He rejected me,” she said. But she added, “it was a necessary meeting for me, to turn the page and move on and know where I was from and learn about my identity.”
Monpierre, a filmmaker, turned her personal journey into a movie. “Le Bonheur D’Elza,” the story of a Frenchwoman in Guadeloupe looking for her out-of-wedlock father, is one of the highlights of this year’s April in Paris Film Festival, which will run from April 12 to 18 at Cinestudio, 300 Summit St., at Trinity College in Hartford.
Monpierre, who went to the Sorbonne and Smith College, is based in New York, where she cut her teeth as a filmmaker making commercials for Pepsi, Pizza Hut, Visa, Gillette, Bayer and other advertisers. She then became an independent filmmaker, because she wasn’t seeing the stories in cinemas that she wanted to see.
“It was very important to get the message out there and speak about the people in my community, in my island country,” she said. “The Afro-Caribbean experience is practically unknown for the international audience. You never really see Caribbean people on the screen.
“Everything we saw was comedy and action stuff, and that is nice, but I could not necessarily relate to it,” she said. “Very few films really talk about just love and inspiration and daily family issues that touch everybody and that are universal.”
The film industry in those island countries is very small, but it is growing. Monpierre got lucky, and received a grant from a fund established in Guadeloupe in 2005 to tell Guadeloupean stories on screen.
Her own story was a natural. She changed the story to make it more cinematic, but the bones of the narrative are the same. In the movie, the mother opposes her daughter’s quest. In real life, it was different. “Mother never asked me to go back but she never told me not to. When I told her I was going, she told me good luck, here is a picture of him, this is the address where I saw him the last time,” she said. “That address that she gave me was the starting point of my research. Step by step I was able to locate him.”
The role of Elza is played by beautiful newcomer Stana Roumilla. The mother is played by Monpierre herself. “It was such a difficult role for me to cast. I felt like nobody could portray my mom. At end of the day I realized I would be the best person to cast as my mom,” she said. “I had a very interesting relationship with my mother. We are different from each other. There were a lot of conflicts. I understand her much better now that I have a child and I am older.”
